Wheaton College overhauls LMS with Schoology

April 20th, 2016

The college is focusing on learner-centric design, ability to support traditional and online teaching methods, and integration capabilities

Wheaton College has implemented Schoology as its new learning management system (LMS). The five-year contract makes Schoology available to more than 2,500 Wheaton College students and the institution’s academic, extracurricular and administrative branches.

Research from EDUCAUSE reports that while learning management systems are installed at nearly every college and university campus, only half of the professors use their LMSs. Reasons for lack of use include poor integration, difficult interfaces and the inability of many older LMSs to keep up with the sophisticated needs of traditional and online teaching methods. Furthermore according to the research, very few professors use their existing LMSs to engage with students outside of the classroom.

Wheaton College stated that Schoology was a new and more technologically sophisticated LMS able to combine instructional and communication tools into a collaborative learning interface as reasons for selecting the platform. “We are pleased to welcome Wheaton College, an elite liberal arts college with forward-thinking leaders, as a new customer. Wheaton College saw the power and potential of Schoology’s learner-centric design with a more invigorated focus on student engagement, achievement, and retention than the course-centric designs of a traditional LMS.” said Jeremy Friedman, CEO of Schoology.

Schoology connects all the people, content, and systems that fuel education in a platform that’s so easy to use, it’s second nature. The platform offers higher ed institutions time-saving course management, assessment management, in-depth analytics, and flexible standards-based integrations that make it simple to connect other systems. Schoology also provides native mobile apps so faculty can manage their classes on the go and students can stay connected on any device.

“Our students and faculty participated heavily in the selection process for our new LMS. The students were clear that they wanted a platform that was simple to use on any device and powerful enough to be fully adopted by all faculty so that there would be just one LMS for all of their courses and activities,” said Wendy Woodward, Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Wheaton College. “We selected Schoology because of its intuitive learner-centric design, its ability to support our traditional and new teaching methods, and its strong integration capabilities.”